DistroWatch Weekly

A weekly opinion column and a summary of events from the distribution world

DistroWatch Weekly

DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 98, 2 May 2005

Welcome to this year's 18th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! If you are losing patience waiting for the ISO images of the new Mandriva Linux 2005, why not perform a network installation instead? It is easy and we'll show you how. Will will also address the issue of the never-ending stream of new distributions vying for our attention, and point out some serious problems with the latest release of the GCC compiler. In the biggest DistroWatch Weekly ever, we have a user-contributed review of the increasingly popular SLAX live CD, and present FetchYahoo in Robert Storey's "Tips, tricks & hints" section. Happy reading!

Although there is a rumour saying that the ISO images of Mandriva Linux 2005 Limited Edition should hit the public download mirrors early in May, if you have a broadband connection, there is no reason to wait. As a matter of fact, you can install Mandriva Linux 2005 today, directly from one of the FTP or HTTP servers. Depending on the speed of your connection, activity on the download server, and the number of packages you need, the system installation will take around 2 - 4 hours. If you start it just before you retire for the night, it will more than likely complete by the time you wake up in the morning.

The FTP/HTTP installation is pretty straightforward and intuitive. First, you need to download the bootable installation CD from one of the Mandriva mirrors, e.g.: this one: boot.iso. This is a 14.2MB file that includes the installer, together with most network kernel modules. While you are on the download page, choose one of the mirrors near you and write down the exact patch to the installation directory - you will need that information later. Now, burn the ISO to a CD using your preferred CD burning software, then place it into your CD-ROM tray and reboot your computer.

Follow the instruction on the screen, which shouldn't be too difficult for most users. The only tricky place is where you need to type in the FTP or HTTP server containing the Mandriva Linux distribution. To continue with our belnet.be example, this is what you'd need to type in (leave the login and passwords fields empty):

The above entries will of course vary, depending on your chosen mirror. The rest of the installation process differs very little from standard installation from ISO images, except that it will take longer.

Despite its status as a "transitional release", we found Mandriva Linux 2005 an impressive distribution. Although in terms of packages included it is not as up-to-date as the recent SUSE or Ubuntu releases, it is clear that Mandriva has benefitted from the long public testing period and the experience of its developers. Additionally, Dr Zhu, our regular contributor in Beijing, reports that Mandriva 2005 has implemented substantial improvements in rendering of Asian fonts, which are now remarkably crisp and good-looking. Overall, Mandriva Linux 2005 is a fast and powerful distribution, certainly worth considering as your primary Linux desktop.

Are there too many Linux distributions? Linux.org has posted an interesting analysis of the current situation on the distribution front and explains why the growing number of Linux distributions might not be a good thing for the adoption of Linux on a larger scale: "But there is a downside to it that really needs to be addressed. That is that there are now too many distributions and the ability to identify exactly what Linux is and to 'sell' it may become more difficult when it should be getting easier. I think developers need to ask themselves whether it might be more advantageous for the community as a whole for them to volunteer on existing, popular distributions rather than to create their own."

This is certainly a valid point. At DistroWatch, we currently list over 350 active distributions, with over 100 more on the waiting list. The sad truth is that the majority of these projects will undoubtedly die after the initial enthusiasm for the project is over. As such, most distributions are now developed for the sole benefit of the developers themselves - to learn and to get some Linux experience. Judging by the easy manner with which some of these project get abandoned, we, the users, matter very little.

What do you think? Should we urge the developers of new distributions to join an existing project, rather than develop a yet-another-distribution? Or do you believe that new distributions can bring new ideas to the market and therefore should be encouraged? Please discuss below.

* * * * *

The recent release of GCC 4.0.0 was anticipated with much enthusiasm. The new version was expected to be a major improvement over the 3.x series, especially in terms of support for the increasingly fashonable 64-bit processors. As always, distributions are slow to adopt the new compiler release until it has been through its paces and, possibly, until a new point release fixes some of the more obvious problems.

Unfortunately, it seems that GCC 4.0.0 has not been well-tested before it was declared "stable". That's according to this post by the Ark Linux development team: "GCC 4.0.0 should have received a lot more testing before being released as 'stable'. It is currently known to mis-compile the KDE desktop as well as parts of the Linux kernel (this is already fixed in CVS). Also, while it is a major step forward in terms of optimization infrastructure, it doesn't bring a lot of things that are helpful to anyone but developers of GCC itself - in our tests [with a slightly pre-4.0 CVS snapshot], the speed was not much better than with earlier GCCs, but the binaries got about 15% bigger." More information about the tests by the Ark Linux developers can be read here.

Featured distribution of the week: SLAX

Review of SLAX 5.0.4 by Ralph Patterson

Live distributions are like living creatures. They need to be fed and nurtured to survive and be useful. Without utility and evolution, operating systems and software generally die an early Darwinian death - remember all the Win9Xs. SLAX, KNOPPIX, and others capitalize on the ideology of being as small as possible without compromising functionality. This "without compromise" thought in many respects is of an advantage as the general movement of live distributions seek to put as robust features as possible into their packaging, making them some of the most useful of operating systems. SLAX is one of these uncompromising examples of a live distribution of Linux.

Using Slackware as its base, SLAX has a minimum of requirements; 30MB to boot, 64MB to run X window and 128MB to run X window with KDE, and a 486 processor or better. As a live distribution it can be launched using an IDE CDROM or a USB flash disk. Despite its size, it has all the open source software that the average PC user will ever need. It is an excellent alternative to a Windows based system given its portability and ease of use. It can literally be used on just about any machine with sufficient RAM. It is fast to load, easy and fun to use. SLAX will work from a command line or GUI interface. It is simply too cool of an operating system to be ignored.

As with most operating systems, revisions are inevitable. SLAX is no different with respect to having a healthy changelog with one exception - the speed at which fixes are generated and the distribution is updated. Not having dug into the guts of the differences between the distribution bases (be it Debian, Slackware, etc), the ease of this is not understood by me (and I suspect neither by others that haven't taken the time to evaluate the subdermal structures of the organs behind the various species of penguin they are using). Nevertheless, Tomáš Matějíček and an ambitious forum crew (Endymion, dustin_wielenga32, specter, pekster, and others), which Tomaš gives credit to, are quick to turn out updates and corrections. An excellent example is the 5.0.2 revision which didn't recognize the P/S2 mouse, Tomaš and the forum crew dug in and cranked out 5.0.3 less than a day later. So fast in fact, I left one evening thinking my mouse had gone the way of the PCs hard drive months before, only to arrive the next morning with an update posted on DistroWatch. Not to be outdone, 5.0.4 quickly followed with an installer, remount and sync options. SLAX has various flavors within itself including a "KillBill" version, all keeping within the frame work of fitting on a 200MB mini disk.

I've been using SLAX on and off now for about a year, lately on a PIII-450 which suffered a hard drive failure approximately 8 months ago and was about to be chit-canned by our IT department. Most in the lab thought I was crazy when I argued to keep the machine in light of the fact IT was refusing to order (or give ... they have a ton of surplus hard drives) a new drive for the aging (?) box. I wanted to keep the machine mostly because I'd scavenged a burner and extra memory mere days before its hard drive demise. Everyone, IT included, thought I was mad to want to keep a machine which appeared unbootable, let alone usable. They were amazed when I popped a copy of SLAX 5.0.1 in and began working on my graduate thesis proposal right were I left off in MS Word using KWrite. Given that I like to customize my desktop and have made configuration changes, IT thought they had me with a flaw in the live CD design; that is, until I saved my data and configuration changes to my thumb drive (configsave /dev/sda0 from a terminal window) ... makes you wonder if an MCSE is really worth having. IT, needing to get the last word in, wondered off stating they do not offer support for linux ... who needs 'em anyway when you've got such an active users' forum?!

If you haven't tried SLAX, it's time to give it a test drive. I've found it insurmountable in my arsenal of Linux distributions. If you find it useful, please pay homage, at the very least, by sharing it with someone else. On our modest college campus here in western North Carolina (USA) I'm finding enough interest to the point I may even be able to start up a small LUG before I graduate. It will definitely be one distribution available for viewing at our next Software Freedom Day. The SLAX forum can be found here. Check out the forum, the time for downloading SLAX is relatively fast given its small size, I think it is worthwhile and that you'll like what you'll find.

Released Last Week

ParallelKnoppix 2005-04-25

A new version of ParallelKnoppix has been released. What's new? "New version based on Knoppix 3.8.1. Setup has been streamlined quite a bit, and the dialog boxes have a much nicer font; tutorial has been updated to explain the new setup method, and to cut down on toner usage when printed; bootstrapping example for Octave (now at 2.1.69)." Read the release announcement on the distribution's home page.

SLAX 5.0.4

Another new version of SLAX is out, just two days after version 5.0.3. From the changelog: "SLAX updated to Slackware current; fixed Kopete, it doesn't crash anymore (updated libxslt); recompiled KDE, added cyrus-sasl support; fixed SLAX installer, added remount, sync option; added MPlayer 1.0pre7; firewall is not started automatically anymore."

Foresight Linux 0.8

A new version of Foresight Linux has been announced on the project's Wiki pages: "We are proud to present you Foresight Linux 0.8! Reacting on critics we increased the speed of the installation process. It is up to 60% faster! We also included a new boot splash and did lots of cosmetic things. Old and new highlights are 'Conary' (revolutionary package management program) and nice tools like Beagle and F-Spot. Also included is the latest version of Oversite systems management tool, which now has a GUI configuration interface. It is still under development, but is currently very functional for keeping you system up to date!" Here is the full release announcement.

Mandriva Linux 2005 (PPC)

The PPC edition of Mandriva Linux 2005 Limited edition has been released in the form of three ISO images: "The new release has been on the mirrors for a few days already but here's the unofficial announcement: Mandriva Linux Limited Edition 2005 for PPC is available! It looks like we have a new name, an inflated version number, and a new way-too-happy penguin. Also Linux kernel 2.6.11, GNOME 2.8,3, KDE 3.3.2, X.Org 6.8.2, GCC 3.4.3, and much more on three 700MB ISO images. If that's not enough, there's 7+GB of packages on the mirrors." Find more information in the release announcement.

Frugalware Linux 0.2

Frugalware Linux 0.2 has been released: "The Frugalware Developer Team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Frugalware 0.2, our second stable release. A short list of the most important improvements and bugfixes since 0.2rc2: updated Mozilla Suite to 1.7.7 and MPlayer 1.0pre7; new packages - irda-utils (utilities for infrared communication between devices) and frugalrledit (runlevel editor for Frugalware Linux); added patch to binutils to ignore as_needed libs that were not needed. Please refer to the Frugalware ChangeLog for more information." Here is the full release announcement.

Onebase Linux 2005 has been released: "The Onebase Linux Project is proud to announce the 'Project Re-launch' by introducing version 2005. After 5 months of intense development and testing we made a hallmark improvement and brought numerous features. Our focus was not on bringing yet-another-Linux by simply repackaging or showcasing déjà vu software. Instead, Onebase Linux 2005 brings a new face of Linux with its improved file hierarchy, boot system and addition of Onebase Portal. The following link gives information about the prime features present in this release." Read the full release announcement for additional details.

Daemon News reports about the delay in the much awaited release of FreeBSD 5.4: "FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long says that they are a bit behind on FreeBSD 5.4 release. The stability problem reported several weeks ago in a particular high load, high profile environment has been resolved and the release process is under way now." FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE is now expected to hit the download mirrors on 7 May; here is the updated release schedule.

Vidalinux 1.2

The Vidalinux development team has published details about the upcoming release of Vidalinux 1.2: "This is the full list of features that VLOS 1.2 will have. The release date is June 20, 2005, this release will include a high range of features that will make this distribution very powerful: GNOME 2.10; KDE 3.4.0; kernel 2.6.11; bug fixes and security updates; reworked Anaconda installer with new features; two CDs installation; new Portage GUI application with lot of new features; new artwork and logos; PPC platform support; 3D accelerators drivers installed by default (ATI, NVIDIA); new binaries repositories and VLOS rsync server; more wireless-friendly...." Find more information in this announcement.

StartCom Enterprise Linux 4.0

StartCom has announced that development has started on StartCom Enterprise Linux 4.0, a distribution rebuilt from source RPMs of Red Hat Enterprise Linux: "StartCom Enterprise Linux 4.0.x is under development and will be released soon, starting with the x86 (i686) architecture, followed by a release for AMD's Opteron 64 bit (x86_64) CPUs. You may want to browse the RPM trees at one of the download mirrors to see the progress for this release, code named "Barak", meaning lightning in Hebrew. " No fixed roadmap has been given, but you can read the announcement on this page.

The recipient of our April 2005 donation is the NdisWrapper project. For those that are new to this web site, just a quick re-cap: DistroWatch.com donates 10% of income from advertising on the site to various open source software projects on a monthly basis. Readers are welcome to nominate their favourite open source projects - either by mentioning it in the forum below, or by direct email (which can be found at the bottom of every page).

If you are using a wireless network card on your Linux-based operating system, it is likely that you have heard of NdisWrapper. Since many wireless network card manufacturers do not release specifications of their products, the NdisWrapper project has developed a Linux kernel module that loads and runs Ndis (Windows network driver API) drivers supplied by the vendors. This project has been a life-saver for many notebook users who would otherwise not be able to take advantage of their notebook's built-in wireless network capabilities under Linux. It goes without saying that the NdisWrapper developers have considerable expenses while testing various wireless network cards and we hope that our donation will help them cover some of the cost.

As always, our donations programme is a joint initiative between DistroWatch and LinuxCD.org, which contributes US$50 every month. LinuxCD.org is an online store selling low-cost Linux/BSD CDs - they have the largest selection, inclusive of all the latest releases, and they offer the lowest prices. Next time you need to order your favourite Linux or BSD CDs, get them from LinuxCD.org.

Here is the PayPal receipt for our donation:

This email confirms that you have paid OSDN / VA Software $250.00 USD using PayPal.

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Transaction ID: 9RA696345P350230W
Total: $250.00 USD
Item Title: Donation
Invoice ID: 234835
Message: This is a donation by DistroWatch.com as part of our programme to support OSS projects. Keep up the good work!

Here is the list of projects that received a DistroWatch donation since the launch of the programme:

Arabian Linux. Arabian Linux is a bootable CD containing the Linux operating system. The goal of the project is to build a simple desktop-oriented distribution that can run from a CDROM or hard drive. Arabian Linux is based on Kurumin Linux and Debian GNU/Linux.

Arabian Linux - a new distribution and live CD for the Arabic speakers, based on Kurumin Linux(full image size: 674kB)

Mayix XliveCD. Mayix XliveCD is a Gentoo-based Linux live CD with GNOME as its default desktop. The project also develops a "stage4" CD, which allows users to install a full Gentoo Linux desktop system in under one hour.

Rubix Linux. Rubix is a Linux distribution forked from Slackware Linux. It differs from its parent in that Rubix uses Arch Linux's 'pacman' for simplified package management with dependency resolution and it has a completely revamped init system, maintaining the BSD style, but adding modularity.

* * * * *

New on the waiting list

Decebal Linux. Decebal Linux is a new source-based distribution with tightened security; it includes the ProPolice stack smashing protector and other patches. The distribution's web site is still under construction and lacks more detailed information, but a release candidate of Decebal Linux 0.9.0 is already available for download and testing.

MOPS Linux. MOPS Linux is a new Russian distribution based on Slackware Linux. The product includes several packages that don't feature in Slackware itself; these include geodata libraries, PostgreSQL, Squid, Xmail, Webmin, OpenOffice.org, and other software.

Muriqui Linux. Muriqui Linux is a new Brazilian distribution based on Debian, but with the port of Red Hat's Anaconda installer. It is developed by Instituto Doctum de Educação e Tecnologia

Pentoo LiveCD. Pentoo is a Linux live CD, which boots into a Linux environment on any x86-based PC. It is similar to KNOPPIX, except that Pentoo is based on Gentoo Linux. The main purpose of Pentoo LiveCD is penetration testing.

SUTLinux. SUTLinux is a Thai Linux distribution and live CD based on Thailand's popular OpenTLE project.

* * * * *

DistroWatch database summary

Number of Linux distributions in the database: 402

Number of BSD distributions in the database: 11

Number of discontinued distributions: 49

Number of distributions on the waiting list: 110

Tips, tricks & hints (by Robert Storey)

FetchYahoo

I was at much pains to describe to him the use of money, the materials it was made of, and the value of the metals; that when a Yahoo had got a great store of this precious substance, he was able to purchase whatever he had a mind to; the finest clothing, the noblest houses, great tracts of land, the most costly meats and drinks, and have his choice of the most beautiful females. Therefore since money alone was able to perform all these feats, our Yahoos thought they could never have enough of it.

-- Lemuel Gulliver, in Gulliver's Travels

* * * * *

When I was just a young lad, I thought the term Yahoo! was simply what a cowboy yelled while trying to ride a wild bucking bronco. I wasn't until much later that I read Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (a great book) and found out what Yahoo really means. However, to most people nowdays, Yahoo! is the name of a web portal and email service.

Thus, no prizes for guessing that FetchYahoo is the name of a utility that can fetch mail from your Yahoo account, thereby eliminating the need for you to use a web browser for mail access. FetchYahoo downloads the mail from your Yahoo inbox and delivers it to your local machine's mail spool (usually found in directory /var/mail or /var/spool/mail depending on your distribution). You can then read your messages with a mail client like Kmail, Mutt or Sylpheed (assuming you've set these up to read local mail - more on that below).

FetchYahoo sounds a lot like Fetchmail, and you might wonder why you couldn't just use the latter to do the same thing. In fact, you could - if you pay for the privilege. Yahoo no longer offers free POP service, but it is available for a fee. FetchYahoo is a Perl script that cleverly circumvents this need. Of course, it may well be worthwhile paying for Yahoo's mail service (to gain more server space and other features) - that's just a decision you'll have to make.

Few (if any) distributions come with FetchYahoo pre-installed, but it's easy to obtain. Users of Debian-based distributions can do an apt-get install fetchyahoo, but it should be simple enough to find a RPM binary as well. In FreeBSD, the port resides in /usr/ports/mail/fetchyahoo. If your distribution doesn't have a packages, just go to the source. Being written in Perl, FetchYahoo is easy to install on Linux and BSD (indeed, people have even gotten it to run on Windows).

Once installed, your next adventure is to configure FetchYahoo to your needs. The installation procedure should have left you with a sample configuration file - at least in the case of Debian, the file is found here:

/usr/share/doc/fetchyahoo/examples/fetchyahoorc

Copy the fetchyahoorc example file to your home directory, rename it .fetchyahoorc and set it's permissions so that only you (the user) have read/write access:

chmod 600 .fetchyahoorc

Then with your favorite editor, open the file. Most of the settings are optional and self-explanatory, but a few are absolutely mandatory. You will, of course, need to fill in the following settings with correct info:

###### SHOULD configure these ######
username = yahoo-user-name
# this can be a password or an md5_hex hashed password
password = yahoo-password

The next section is concerned with configuring your mail spool. You will probably want to use mail spooling (that is, Fetchmail-style local delivery of messages to your machine), but another possibility is that you will instead choose to forward the messages elsewhere (that's configured further down in the .fetchyahoorc file - we'll get to that shortly). For example, if you normally collect all your email from my_name@my_isp.com, you could forward all your mail to there and disable spooling.

###### mail spool, mbox file and procmail configs ######

# set use-spool to 0 to disable outputting to a file/filter
use-spool = 1
# if spoolName ends with a / we output in maildir format to that directory
spool = /var/mail/local-user-name

Note that on many distros, the mail spool may reside in /var/spool/mail rather than /var/mail. As for the local-user-name above, that's your usual logon name (so in my case I set this to "/var/mail/robert"). If you've never set up mail spooling before, check your /var/mail (or /var/spool/mail) directory and see that your logon name is there. If not, as root create the necessary file and set the correct ownerships and user permissions (in my case):

cd /var/mail
touch robert
chown robert:mail robert
chmod 660 robert

Finally, note that mail spooling requires that you have a Mail Transfer Agent or MTA (such as Sendmail, Postfix, Exim, etc) installed, configured and running in the background. In years past, setting up a MTA was a big trauma, but these days many distributions do it for you. Configuring a MTA is beyond the scope of this article, and the only thing I'll say about it now is that I recommend Postfix. Take a look at the Postfix website if you need more info. Also, you'll need to set up your mail client (Kmail, Sylpheed, etc) to collect mail from the spool file.

At this point, you've done enough to start downloading your mail from Yahoo. However, you do have a number of other useful options further down in the file, and it's worth taking a look at those. You may, for example, want to empty the Bulk folder automatically, since it tends to be filled with nothing but spam. Do that by changing the following setting to 1:

# set this to 1 to enable emptying the Bulk folder before fetching messages
empty-bulk = 0

Although not strictly necessary, you can also automatically empty the Trash folder. FetchYahoo gives you the option of emptying the trash before or after you check the mail, but I found that emptying the trash before checking didn't work. Emptying it after worked fine. You'll find the settings here:

# set either of these to 1 to enable mail checking before or after downloading msgs
empty-trash-after = 0
empty-trash-before = 0

I did mention above that you could forego mail spooling altogether and instead choose to forward your mail to your regular email account at your ISP. Take a look at the following settings if you wish to enable this:

# the e-mail address used as the from address, this should probably be at the
# same ISP as the outgoing smtp mailhost specified above
send-from = me@example.com

There are still more possible tweaks, but the above should be enough to keep most users happy. To actually download (or forward) your Yahoo mail, just run fetchyahoo from the command line. Hardcore geeks might want to set up FetchYahoo as a cron job to check for mail at specified intervals.

One final tidbit before departing - many have wondered if there is an equivalent utility for Hotmail. Indeed there is, called Gotmail. However, Hotmail is owned by Microsoft, and consider this message from the Gotmail maintainers: "Although the team behind Gotmail tries to keep it working, every few months Hotmail makes changes which break this until they have time to fix it. Have a backup plan for email access in case that happens."

An inadvertent and totally coincidental oversight by Microsoft, I'm sure.

-- Robert Storey

DistroWatch in the News

DistroWatch on Microsoft.com

Folks, we have done it - DistroWatch is now linked directly from a web page at Microsoft.com! It is a page discussing computer security (of all pages) and although the article has generated negligible amount of traffic for this web site, it still represents an interesting point of view. Naturally, don't expect much flattery on account of Linux, but don't dismiss the article either - the author presents some interesting points. More details in Security Management: When an Issue Affects Multiple Products.

That's all for today. We hope that you enjoyed this week's DistroWatch Weekly!

Ladislav Bodnar

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